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eMOLT Update 2023-03-31
Thanks to those of you who stopped by to introduce yourselves at the
Mass Lobstermen’s meeting last weekend in Hyannis. It’s always good to
put faces to some of the longtime participants I still haven’t met and
introduce the eMOLT program to potential new participants. Thanks
especially to Captain John Thomas and his crew who were gracious enough
to let Huanxin’s daughter and my daughter hop aboard the F/V Rachel Leah
and meet a real lobster last Saturday while Huanxin and I worked on
their eMOLT system.
We continue to make headway on our software consolidation project. By
taking the best running code from the deckboxes that Huanxin and Jim
built and combining it with the newer features developed by the team at
Lowell Instruments, we’re hoping to make troubleshooting easier for
everyone and provide all of you with the best deckboxes we can. One
major improvement will be adding a way to dim the screen. Yes, you read
that right… once we implement this change, there will be no more need
for socks, hats, gaiters, or cardboard covers over your deckbox.
We’ve also been working with the National Ocean Service to make sure
the deckboxes calculate all of the parameters they need to put these
data to use in marine forecasts. By this time next month, we hope to
have a test server up and running at the Gulf of Maine Lobster
Foundation to serve those data up to NOAA’s High Performance Computing
Center.
Jim Tripp, a longtime eMOLT participant out of Spruce Head Maine,
documented his warmest year yet in 63 fathoms (~114 meters). As seen in
the figure below , early
February 2023 was especially warmer than all his other years at this
site. While Jim is retiring from fishing at this site, we hope his son
John may be able to maintain a year round location nearby. We also got
another year of data from Bruce Fernald’s site in 25 fathoms off Little
Cranberry and hoping his brother Mark’s 30 fathom probe shows up
soon.
We were happy to secure the last 17 Minilog-II probes available from
INNOVASEA (aka VEMCO). These devices have served us well. This new batch
will provide us the instruments needed to maintain the original eMOLT
sites for another decade.
An article was published in Nature Communications this past month
entitled “Bottom marine heatwaves along the continental shelves of North
America” describing the similarities and, most importantly, the
differences with surface heatwaves. While the results were obtained
purely from model output, they did, at least, mentioned the importance
of observations a couple times.
The Southern Maine Community College prepared a drifter and had it
deployed by Capt Jeff Putman on the F/V Captain B. You can follow that
track here. 
Realtime Summary (Vessels with Rockblock Satellite
Transmitters)
This week, we received 32 haul-averaged reports from 5 vessels.
eMOLT Satellite Transmitter status plot for
the previous week.
In the figure above, you can see the approximate locations where we
received “Status Reports” (a ping from your system letting us know that
it’s still working) and “Data Uploads” (actual temperature / depth data
collected by your probes). The “Status Reports” come in every 12 hours
or so when a system is powered up. “Data Uploads” only come in when you
haul the probes. If you were out fishing and don’t see your approximate
locations on here, please reach out because there may be a problem with
your system.
NECOFS Bottom Temperature Forecast

Announcements
Recently, we’ve heard reports from some lobstermen about shells
not hardening up as much as they used to. If you’ve noticed something
similar, please reach out. Shell hardness can be influenced by many
environmental factors including water temperature, salinity, pH, and
dissolved oxygen.
We appreciate your patience as we work our way through the
waitlist of vessels. We rely on grant funds to expand eMOLT to new
platforms, and those grants often have specific goals. For example, we
recently wrapped up a major effort here in Massachusetts to outfit 12
additional vessels that was funded by the Massachusetts Seaport Economic
Council. That project was designed to dovetail with and support the Cape
Cod Bay Dissolved Oxygen Study Fleet organized by Tracy Pugh at MADMF.
Our next large scale deployment will be funded by the Lobster Institute
to add 6-12 new vessels in Mid-Coast Maine and Downeast. There are
additional vessels in New Bedford and on Cape Cod who we’re working to
find systems for as well.
For those of you who’ve caught the research bug and are looking
for another piece of environmental data to collect off your vessels,
consider checking out the SeaHawk Project. This
project uses low-cost Secchi disks to ground-truth water clarity
measurements taken from satellite imagery, which is one way to study
phytoplankton abundance. For more information, please contact Delaney McBride at the University of North
Carolina, Wilmington.
All the best, George and JiM
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